By subjecting an exposed silver halide photographic light-sensitive material to color development, an oxidized aromatic primary amine color developing agent is allowed to react with a dye-forming coupler to form a dye in an exposed area, and thereby dye images are formed.
In this photographic method, the substractive color process is used for color reproduction, and thus yellow, magenta and cyan dye images are formed.
As photographic couplers to form yellow dye images, there are used, for example, acylacetanilide-type couplers; as magenta dye image forming couplers, for example, pyrazolone-type, ptrazolobenzimidazole-type, pyrazolotriazole-type and indazolone-type couplers are employed; and as cyan dye image forming couplers, there are generally used, for example, phenol-type and naphthol-type couplers.
The dye images obtained as above are desired not to discolor or fade even when exposed to light or kept under high temperature and high humidity conditions over a long time.
However, cyan dye images obtained from phenol-type or naphthol-type couplers are still insufficient in spectral absorption properties, heat resistance, moisture resistance and light fastness. Studies are continued for years to solve these problems, and various proposals have been made including contrivance on subtituents of such couplers, but there has not been obtained any compound which answers all of these problems.